Buried Bodies and Buried Truths

Enforced disappearances. Disappearances of Indigenous women and children from the Americas that are aided and abetted by local, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies across the continent, by those in the highest reaches of the United States and other militaries, private industry, local, state and federal houses of legislature, and government-owned multimillion dollar enterprises. All in concert with a multinational organized syndicate, with one aim.

The commissions, conferences, task forces, and journalists are, in my opinion, afraid of the real truth, the dark and vast truth of how their communities are both unwittingly and consciously involved in the trafficking of young indigenous people around the world. Some are not afraid of the truth itself but of speaking it brings potential death to them and their families. Others, knowing that when their practices are made public, they will face deep shame and as their masks fall away, so will the things that have buoyed them.

From Cherry Point to Tulalip, from Yellowknife to the Yucatan, Vancouver to Morocco, Seattle to Seoul, and hundreds of points in between, young people are taken from their communities, drugged, transported, held until auctioned off, and sold to the highest bidder who in turn, turns them out onto Embassy Rows and Indian (and other) casinos to be fucked to death.

Unmarked individual and mass graves are sprinkled across the North American continent, including in the United States. They hold the bodies of sisters, daughters, sons, uncles, toddlers, teens, aunties who have been deemed disposable by others, including those within their own communities; the ‘just whores’, ‘the trash’ and ‘got what was coming to ’ems’. Some burned, some buried, some with ‘donatable’ organs removed before the burning or burying.

These, too, are the truths we must face. Those truths, like the bodies that have been buried, will rise to be faced.

The sand doesn’t hold its secrets long; that asphalt will rise as the ashes have. Dust devils will clear the way and the shorelines will shift. The lodge poles and logs will crumble like the shaky foundations we have built. When the bones are revealed by the sun and the light of truth snakes into the other hidden places, within hearts and the ground, those things held tightly will, too, be revealed.